ANGLE - Almost Native Graphics Layer Engine

The goal of ANGLE is to allow users of multiple operating systems to seamlessly run WebGL and other OpenGL ES content by translating OpenGL ES API calls to one of the hardware-supported APIs available for that platform. ANGLE currently provides translation from OpenGL ES 2.0 and 3.0 to desktop OpenGL, OpenGL ES, Direct3D 9, and Direct3D 11. Support for translation from OpenGL ES to Vulkan is underway, and future plans include compute shader support (ES 3.1) and MacOS support.

Level of OpenGL ES support via backing renderers

Direct3D 9

Direct3D 11

Desktop GL

GL ES

Vulkan

OpenGL ES 2.0

complete

complete

complete

complete

in progress

OpenGL ES 3.0

complete

complete

in progress

not started

OpenGL ES 3.1

not started

in progress

in progress

not started

Platform support via backing renderers

Direct3D 9

Direct3D 11

Desktop GL

GL ES

Vulkan

Windows

complete

complete

complete

complete

in progress

Linux

complete

in progress

Mac OS X

in progress

Chrome OS

complete

planned

Android

complete

in progress

ANGLE v1.0.772 was certified compliant by passing the ES 2.0.3 conformance tests in October 2011. ANGLE also provides an implementation of the EGL 1.4 specification.

ANGLE is used as the default WebGL backend for both Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox on Windows platforms. Chrome uses ANGLE for all graphics rendering on Windows, including the accelerated Canvas2D implementation and the Native Client sandbox environment.

Portions of the ANGLE shader compiler are used as a shader validator and translator by WebGL implementations across multiple platforms. It is used on Mac OS X, Linux, and in mobile variants of the browsers. Having one shader validator helps to ensure that a consistent set of GLSL ES shaders are accepted across browsers and platforms. The shader translator can be used to translate shaders to other shading languages, and to optionally apply shader modifications to work around bugs or quirks in the native graphics drivers. The translator targets Desktop GLSL, Direct3D HLSL, and even ESSL for native GLES2 platforms.

Sources

ANGLE repository is hosted by Chromium project and can be browsed online or cloned with